Baz Luhrmann Reveals The Great Gatsby Song By Prince That Never Was
This week saw the sad and sudden passing of music legend Prince, but did you know he produced music for Baz Luhrmann’s ‘The Great Gatsby’?
According to the Australian film director during a Tribeca Q&A, Prince was meant to feature on the soundtrack for the Leonardo DiCaprio-led film. But despite doing some extensive work with the late icon, it never quite made it through.
“I was working with Prince on a song for Gatsby and it was a re-imagined version of a song he did with Martika called ‘Love…Thy Will Be Done’ and it was going to be a major piece in [the film],“ Luhrmann remembers. "And we did work on it. He was in Australia touring and we did some work there. We did further work on it. In fact we worked on it a lot. And there just came a moment when — it’s a co-owned piece and he couldn’t quite get it released. And at that stage I had to make another decision, so I went and worked with Lana Del Rey to do the piece we did.”
It’s a shame that whatever prevented Prince and Luhrmann from completing the track meant he had to look elsewhere, especially after they’d had previous success some 20 years earlier.
It wasn’t the first time the director had teamed up with Prince. 1996′s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ saw the musician rearrange ‘When Doves Cry’ to brilliant effect.
“What I wanted to signal to our audience was you could take something you knew and interpret it in a different way,“ he shared. "We said what if you took that iconic dance track and made it into this pure, religious wedding song. So it’s looking at something, turning it over, using it and interpreting it in a different way.”
“Working with him, he is what he appears to be: one of a kind,“ Luhrmann said about the legend. "There’s only one Prince, and it’s a great sadness that he’s no longer with us.”
While the soundtrack for ‘The Great Gatsby’ was an eclectic, exciting mix of hip hop and other contemporary tunes and styles, we can’t help but wonder how even greater it would’ve been had Prince contributed his magic to the roster.
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Picture credits: WENN, Bazmark Films
